Before We Say Goodbye: Preparing for a Good Death

A further reason for starting to prepare for death when we are young is that old habits die hard, but habits learned early come in handy later.

I met a couple who were dynamic leaders of a tough youth centre. They decided on a job change, and were shortly to become wardens of an old people’s home. I asked them why they were making such an unlikely change. ‘We have realized,’ they told me, ‘that in old age the negative habits that people display in youth come to the surface again. In the working years in between they have merely been covered up. We ourselves will be like those negative young people when we are aged, unless we work on it now. That is what we will now do.’

Good Pope John XXIII started to prepare for his death when he was a student. He used to play a kind of game, imagining that he was on his deathbed. Years later, he made a wonderful death which inspired the world.

You may, of course, be past youth or middle age. There is still hope. Research into the effects of smoking reveals that, although the highest health ratings go to those who gave up smoking from their youth, there is still a measurable improvement in health if lifelong smokers give up the habit as soon as they realize they have a life-threatening condition. It is like that with our preparations for our final goodbye.

PICTURE DEATH

Artists through the ages have tried to portray death. The artist Paul Klee died relatively young, and Death and Fire is one of his last works. A great dome of sun is held aloft by the skull of Death. Art critic Sister Wendy Becket comments:

The man who approaches is stripped to his essence: Is he humanity moving towards the grave? All this might seem sombre, yet the painting is aglow with the most life-affirming colour … Klee announces that death is a purifier, like fire, and a means of fulfilment. 4

The artist Rex Whistler, who was killed in World War II, wrote this:

I suppose it is really the exquisite taste and economy of the Genius who draws our lives which makes life so infinitely lovely and moving, stirring and glorious. It is as though we presumed to stand by the side of a great painter imploring him not to use the dark tones and shadows, but only to put light and more light. How can we know what the great mind has conceived the finished work to be? 5

The Jewish Talmud also sees a link between embracing death and discovering blessed fire:

When Adam saw for the first time the sun go down and an ever deepening gloom enfold creation, his mind was filled with terror. God then took pity on him, and endowed him with the divine intuition to take two stones – the name of one was ‘Darkness’ and the name of the other ‘Shadow of Death’ – and rub them against each other, and so discover fire. Thereupon Adam exclaimed with grateful joy: ‘Blessed be the Creator of light!’

Fire burns surface material and rubbish, but it purifies really precious things such as gold. If, before I die, I dispense with the flotsam, and let gold develop within me, I need not fear.

MASTER THE FEAR OF DEATH

The primal fear of extinction haunts us. Yet, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’

A man comes to learn from a Japanese swordsmaster, who tells him, ‘You already seem to be a master.’

‘The only thing I have mastered is the fear of death,’ the man replies.

‘Then you are already a master,’ the swordsmaster says.

The Japanese arts recognize that you have to meet the fear of death in order to do anything – landscape painting, flower arranging, and so on. If you take the fear of humiliation, or of exposing yourself, and you ask what is frightening about that and try to trace it, you realize that you have a whole series of linkages in your mind which ultimately go back to the fear of death. That is actually the stuff that is controlling you, and if you were not connected up to all that, you would not be afraid to do anything.

The fear of death takes many different disguises. That is why I say it has to be faced over and over again by every society and by every individual.6

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